The Dialogue Venture

Posts Tagged ‘priest’

This morning, to prepare for the upcoming annual convention of our Episcopal Diocese, I am pondering two resolutions on which we will vote. Because I have to suffer through this, so do you. (N.B.: There’s an important point at the end, and it goes way beyond The Episcopal Church. Still, if you’re short on time, skip to the boldface paragraph below.)

The two resolutions deal with the church’s trial courts, which come into play whenever a complaint is lodged against a priest or bishop. Our national convention has instituted a new structure for the court process; some people think it runs against the Church’s constitution. So, I’ve been doing some research to figure out what’s happening here.

Stop me if the following sounds oddly familiar.

One key issue is whether the power to make this change resides with the national authorities or the local authorities. Much has been written to interpret the (possibly) relevant clauses of the Church’s constitution. Look through the constitution itself, however, and the language is not only vague, but written in a specific time and place. It (perhaps deliberately) left the task of interpretation to later generations when they faced issues not covered by the language therein.

Sound familiar yet? If not, here’s a clue: Think U.S. Constitution. And the Bible.

U.S. Constitution first. One key issue is whether the power to make changes resides with the national authorities or the local authorities (i.e., the states). It is perhaps the fundamental difference between Democrat and Republican. Much has been written to interpret the (possibly) relevant clauses of the U.S. Constitution. Look through the Constitution itself, however, and the language is not only vague, but written in a specific time and place. It (perhaps deliberately) left the task of interpretation to later generations when they faced issues not covered by the language therein.

That’s why we have these fierce debates over the separation of church and state, say, or the right to privacy. You won’t find these words in the Constitution itself. Instead, the Constitution left the interpretation up to us.

The Bible, I would submit, is the same way. We have a text that, mediated by the Spirit of God, guides us in the way we live our lives, individually and collectively. It too was written in specific times and places. The authors could not have foreseen, for instance, the scientific findings of the past half millennium, which provide new data to inform the debate over when life begins or whether being GLBT is genetic.

In a nutshell, then: In critical parts of our common life, we have a guiding text before us. It does not answer everything, so our charge is to interpret the text—as well as the interpretations that have come before us—to arrive as close to the truth as we can.

If we can at least agree on this, it could be huge. Why?

Because this perspective cuts us loose from certainty: in particular, the certainty that drives us to point to one clause and divisively proclaim that “the Constitution clearly says.” Our resulting lack of certainty—as well as its corollary, the fact that we need one another to sort out the truth in light of the text—drives us to work together, to listen to one another, in the humility that no one has a corner on The Truth. Out of such collaboration come better dialogue, better ideas, better decisions, and greater unity.

If this is true, my earnest hope is that we can adopt this perspective more fully: in our diocese, in the United States, and in our faith traditions.

This past Wednesday, our interim priest said his last Mass before retiring to Maine. In honor of the occasion, allow me to tell our dialogue story.

He would have been at home in the Middle Ages; I fall into a fuzzy moderate-to-liberal spot on the spectrum. He lamented the decline of proper authority in the Church. He summarily dismissed many perspectives I found worthy of exploration. Some of his comments were withering. Yet when I objected to a point in his sermon one Sunday, I could not manage to keep my mouth shut.

That led to nearly a year’s worth of email discussion on all manner of things spiritual. We exchanged views on evangelism. We wrestled over the Jesus Seminar and the literal truth (or lack thereof) of the Bible. We discussed the state of our own local congregation. 

An academic exercise? Not even close. This priest came to our church when I was in a pivotal but delicate phase of reevaluating my beliefs. My inner wrestling kindled a desire to talk with clergy, because we think about the same things and they’re more educated than I am. Into this situation walks a conservative, combative old priest.

And the dialogue changed my thinking in some unexpected ways.

For one thing, it gave me a place to articulate the vague theological cross-currents in my head. I realized, for instance, that it was possible to hold the Bible as divinely inspired and still accept it as what Marcus Borg calls it: a book written by humans about God. I decided that my progressive friends were right in their embrace of gays and lesbians but maybe not in their denial of the Resurrection. The dialogue allowed me not so much to adopt the priest’s ideas but to test my own.

In short, I learned more about myself, more about what I could believe, and perhaps even a tiny bit more about the Divine.  

Not that the discussion was not all peaches and cream. His emails could be strident; I got exhausted at times. Moreover, I couldn’t see that the dialogue was giving the priest anything new to think about. Is dialogue even worth the effort when one party gets nothing out of it?

Every time I worried about this, I came back to one email. 

Early on, I expressed a desire not to let our discussions get in the way of his church work, and his response stunned me: “If only you knew how deeply many clergy, myself included, long for discussions of this kind.”

We’ve talked here about dialogue’s role in resolving issues and promoting mutual understanding. But maybe there’s more to it than that. Maybe dialogue can be a tonic for the gnawing loneliness that is part and parcel of the human condition. Even if we solve nothing, even if we learn nothing, we have talked. We have listened to others share the things that matter to them. Sometimes that simple connection is all we can ask—and more than we could ever hope.